Single Overhead Camshaft Drive (SOHC) by tallpindo
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Description
What was back in Michigan that I was trying to incorporate in my commercial experience? My friend who had mentored me on hot rods no longer had his cars. The gas station where I had worked was closed. My parents were busy teaching school. Perhaps it was the mystery of the Allison 1710 that sat beside the junior high shop. I never really knew what was inside. Those classes it was purchased for had ended in forties before I was even out of grade school. Later trying to remember it I would say it was green. It had smooth valve covers and was definitely a V-12. I don’t remember where the supercharger was or even if the example I had known daily as I passed it had one mounted. The supercharger on Calvin Rice’s standing kilometer record car was a crank-mounted Roots type. That was clear from text and pictures in Hot Rod magazine. His engine was a Chrysler hemi V-8. The Allison engines of the Arfons Brothers from Ohio that they used in their rear engine dragsters were something I could not glean details from. I did not even know that a tower drive drove the camshafts of the Allison. This type of drive was common on motorcycle engines in one era. The Norton Manx was the most famous but it had dual overhead camshafts (DOHC). I did not meet the Velocette Venom until much later in 1970 or so. I was more familiar with the single overhead camshaft of the Honda Benley and Dream that appeared by the curb with the scooters in 1961/62. These had a chain drive. The Ducati I saw at a speed shop in Saginaw while buying an Auburn clutch had the tower drive but the feature I noticed mostly was the knobby tires as it was set up for scrambles like the one that had come to Huron County one year. My friend from the 50’s now worked as a night service man at the seat belt plant built by Brownline to the south of town. He took me on a tour one Sunday when it was silent. I had this type of seat belt from a Buick in my first car and my 1966 car and 1967 truck had seat belts. Jack Kennedy, the body man and Owendale racer, had shown me the three-point aircraft type wide belt in his stock car. I was convinced they were a useful safety feature. My wife scorned them. She wrecked the car a few times but never wrecked the truck. Among cars, the most notable SOHC would have been a Mercedes-Benz. This manufacturer joined with Studebaker in marketing a Lark with a distinctive chrome mesh radiator image grille. I noticed the feature along with fuel injection on a 230 SE that a fellow worker who I kept as a friend had in his garage. There under the hood was this long skinny six with a boney looking upper end. The classes that took apart the Allison after my father helped Russ LaCronier locate it in a surplus flyer from the Battle Creek center in the mid-forties must have seen the hemispherical combustion chambers that distinguished it from the similar V-12 Packard Merlin. I was not notified. The picture I have with this writeup does not show a reduction drive for the propeller. That was the star feature of the Allison, according to accounts that can be found now. The supercharger was not. This is why the early use of the Allison in the P-51 Mustang was stopped and the Packard-Merlin went on to fame. There was a use of a water-cooled V-12 after WW-II in a commercial DC-6 but it was not a winner. My foray to Michigan with a trip to Broken Rocks to open a cottage for the summer led to only a case of Frankenmuth beer under the tarpaulin to be worried about when we returned to California and passed through the agricultural inspection station at the Arizona border.
Comments (4)
tallpindo
I found this link today to the work of SU and Rolls-Royce as well as Bendix-Stromberg on ADI and pressure carburetors. Too late for the war it could have been a goer on commercial after. SU's were updraft and Bendix-Stromberg were downdraft. Look at where the air scoops are on P-51's early and late and on P-40's and Spitfires to distinguish. Were the Skinner Sisters I bought my literature from related to Skinner-Union (SU)? My friend who campaigned a P-51 in Unlimited after his Gold Cup hydro days tried to make an injection system work on his P-51 and blew the oil cooler off the bottom of it resulting in a dead stick landing at Van Nuys. Kept me looking for Griffon engines and clipped wings as the decades passed. http://www.enginehistory.org/Accessories/HxFuelSys/FuelSysHx09.shtml
mapps
Now there's a whole herd of horses :-)
Cyve
WOW... Mecanic impressively !!!
Richardphotos
the museum at Love Field has one or two of these